I believe that history is best understood through detailed snapshots. Delving into the story of one time, place, and person contextualizes and grounds history’s broad-sweeping narratives. Ian McEwan’s fictional novel Saturday, published in 2005, does just that. A strong, specific sense of time and place is central to Saturday: the story takes place over one 24-hour day in a house in Fitzrovia that is modelled after McEwan’s own. Fitzrovia, or the area between Fitzroy Square and Oxford Street, got its name in the 1930s, according to the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Centre. The Centre goes on to say that, in fact, the area had a name before it was truly a neighborhood. Since then, the area has gone through many ups and downs. Most relevantly, in the past fifty years, immigrant communities are being slowly swept aside by gentrification.

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Saturday takes place on February 15th, 2003, a historical day of anti-war protests against the Iraq War. Most notably, the book explores the themes of happiness in modernity, scientific versus literary thinking, and political engagement. The book has been criticized for being too self-indulgent: however, I believe that the book is more detailed than anything else, with McEwan utilizing a stream-of-thought writing style to commentate on the unconscious mind. The fact that the book is very autobiographical, depicting a home and family based on McEwan’s own, raises interesting questions of how far our storytelling-abilities can truly stretch.

 

Using McEwan’s themes and story concept as a launching pad, I set out to fill in the rest of the week. After researching Fitzrovia in-depth, I created six stories, featuring a multitude of characters, all set in Fitzrovia. In other words, I studied Fitzrovia through the lens of specific people at different points throughout the community’s history. While they reflect a small and limited cast of characters from Fitzrovia’s history, together they form a swatch of the patchwork quilt that is Fitzrovia.

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I wanted to do more than just explore the lives of these characters, but to grapple with relevant themes and pressing issues of modern-day Fitzrovia. “Sunday” explores generational differences, community tolerance, and the changing architecture of Fitzrovia that is often met with hostility. “Tuesday”: gender politics, political engagement, and the role of visual art. “Friday”: the harmful impacts of gentrification, the role of family, and the power of memory. “Monday”: the fading sacredness of community. “Thursday” strongly draws back to Saturday’s discussions of political engagement and happiness in the 21st century. “Wednesday” serves as a metaphor for art-making at-large: how do we represent something that is, in many ways, foreign to us? The list goes on.

 

This project challenged me to write stories that extended beyond my own perspective. It is much easier, and perhaps more politically-appropriate, to write narratives based in the autobiographical. Through this project, I had the opportunity to write about people who are similar yet different from myself. I felt like I got to know each one of them intimately through the storytelling process: I would say that, in their final forms, these stories are about completely new people and characters, as they are deeply infused with my own thoughts and experiences. My final six “day-in-the-life” anecdotes stretched my ability to tell more dynamic stories, in different forms. All serve as case studies for a lively, wavering, and shared Fitzrovia.